“Call.”
“I’m out.”
“I’ll see that. Sir?”
“Oh, I’ll stay, I reckon.”
It was a slow, undemanding sort of game. Just the sort of thing to pass some time while the wind howled the windowpanes loose in their frames and the snow piled deep in the drifts. The only thing Longarm worried about was that he might take too much money off these youngsters. He suspected they could ill afford to have any of their money leave the foursome, so after a few hands he backed off and made a point not to stay in the pots that looked to get serious. Although it hurt like hell to toss in three kings without so much as a draw.
Still, he was damned lucky. Small though it was, he had himself a paycheck through the winter. These boys and thousands more just like them scattered from Montana right on down to Texas weren’t so fortunate.
“Bartender,” he called at one point. “Bring us a bottle here and some fresh glasses. On my tab if you please.”
Amanda Forsyth’s generosity covered the use of a whore if he wanted, but apparently did not extend to free liquor by the bottle. Which was fair enough, of course. The whiskey had to be paid for by the handsome proprietress. A whore’s time did not.
Longarm paid for the bottle, and cut the deck of freshly shuffled cards that Billy offered. All in all, he thought, he’d spent worse afternoons.
Chapter 6
Longarm slept in late. The heck with young entrepreneur Jim Jennison Junior and his hot shaving water. It was just too damn cold to crawl out from under the covers before, say, noon.
When he did wake up to stay—closer to eight of the clock, actually, than to the magical twelve—he decided it really was a shame he couldn’t sleep any more. Because there certainly wasn’t anything in or about Kittstown worth getting up for.
The outside wall of his room was still coated thick with a rime of frost, and his window was still entirely opaque. Outside, he could still hear the wind moaning and thrashing and battering at the walls. Longarm suspected there wasn’t much point in asking if the railroad track was clear yet. With wind like that to contend with, a plow would be lucky to clear its own length. Any hole punched through the drifts would likely close in immediately behind the coal car as fresh drifts formed where the old ones used to be.
It was a pity. Kittstown, Wyoming, was no doubt a nice enough place. But Denver was a helluva lot more amusing, good weather or bad.
Still, a man was best off if he was willing to put up with what he had and never mind the wishes and the what- ifs.
Longarm sat up, scratched an itch in his armpit, and headed for the thunder mug. No way in hell was he going out to the backhouse for his morning dump. Not in that wind, he wasn’t.
He shaved—in cold water, thank you—and just to insure that he looked and felt mostly human, made it a point to put on a tie that was clean and nicely knotted. That done, he went downstairs to breakfast.
He was almost done with a plate of ham and fried potatoes—no eggs were available thanks to the storm and the inconvenience of not having a delivery of produce and other such perishables for several days running—when the Jennison boy came trotting into the dining room and headed straight for Longarm in a coltish lope. The boy was muffled and bundled to the earlobes, and carried a peck of snow with him when he came.
“Marshal, sir. The mayor wants you to come, sir. Quick.”
“You know what for, son?”
“No, sir, but he wants you. He told me to fetch you right away.”
“At his store?”
“Yes, sir. Right away quick.”
Longarm grunted and gave a rueful look toward the remaining ham on his plate. But if he was needed … He wrapped the rest of the ham inside a slice of bread, and munched on it as he went up to his room to get his coat and fur cap. Then he came back downstairs and out into the cutting chill of the wind.
If anything, it was colder and snowier today than it had been to begin with. He turned his face away from the freezing cold and hunched his shoulders. Damn, but it was nasty out. “I’d like you to come with me, Marshal. I, um, may need some advice,” Ira Parminter told him when Longarm stepped inside the mayor’s store.
“Something wrong?”
Parminter motioned toward a trio of children, boys about ten or eleven years old, Longarm guessed. All three of them looked unnaturally pale, and there was frozen puke decorating the woolen coat of one of the boys. “This is Marshal Long, Jacky,” Parminter said. “I want you to tell him what you boys told me.”
The tallest and apparently oldest of the three gave Longarm a skeptical look and then shrugged. “Me and Bert and Bennie there was playing. We was playing hide-and-seek. You know?”
Longarm nodded.
“Yeah, well, there aren’t so many places you can hide when it’s like this, but while we was out … our folks thought we was at each other’s houses, you know?”
“I know how that is,” Longarm assured the boy.
“Right. So we was out. And we thought we’d just, well …”
“What Jacky is avoiding getting around to, Longarm, is that the boys broke into Old Man Travis’s shack,” Parminter said.
